


Roll Over

by LucyAnne



Category: Cherry Almanac
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-17 23:10:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21651298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LucyAnne/pseuds/LucyAnne
Summary: "Roll Over" is a short, pseudo-horror story which follows the unraveling of Maddie, a twenty-something art student who begins repeatedly stumbling upon the strangely dressed-up corpses of several brutally murdered dogs. As she tries with increasing desperation to make sense of everything happening to and around her, a surlier side of her personal life starts peeking its furry head around the corner. Delusion and self-doubt are wildly powerful things.(CW: Dead dogs, violence against animals, toxic/abusive relationships, isolation, mental instability)
Kudos: 1





	Roll Over

Roll Over

Maddie was out walking her partner’s doberman when she found the first dog. It had washed up on the muddy bank of a large drainage ditch, along with a few damp newspapers and a muddied Polar Pop cup. She wasn’t even sure it _was_ a dog until she’d gotten close enough to smell it, and this was only due to the curious fact that it was in what appeared to be an old suitcase, swaddled in a mess of light-pink blankets, with a backwards-facing leg sticking out of a lid with a broken zipper. 

Bored, curious, and not particularly wishing to return home any time soon, she’d carefully made her way down the rain-slicked slope to the water’s edge, where she fished a piece of driftwood out of the muck and stuck it in the case’s opening next to the creature’s leg. It snapped weakly as she heafted it up, but not before the cover opened to a point where it hung in the air momentarily, gravity bringing it slapping down against the water behind it, leaving the case open and its contents revealed. 

It was, in fact, a dog. A small, brown one. Looked young. Apart from that, there was really nothing else to be said. Even for an eagle-eyed dog fanatic, the twisted limbs and discolored hair matted with pond scum made it impossible to make out any distinguishing characteristics. 

Across the water, a couple of kids played at the opening of a great concrete drain pipe built into the hill behind them, totally unaware of Maddie’s presence a mere sixty feet in front of them. At least, that's what she thought. Maddie had always taken great comfort in the feeling of being unseen, unnoticed. It made her feel safe. 

One of them, a young girl, maybe eleven, with mousy brown hair and a turquoise windbreaker, looked up from whatever pond-dwelling insect she'd been examining and waved in Maddie's direction with a smile. It could've been directed at Maddie, or at the doberman standing further up the slope behind her. Either way, it caused her to wince, and she nervously gave a half-hearted twitch of her right hand in response, the other still gripping the leash which kept Hero in place. 

The girl went back to prodding at whatever it was she'd been previously investigating, squatting down in the ankle-deep stream of water flowing from the pipe behind her. It's opening stretched into an endless blackness behind them, like the yawning mouth of a great and terrible worm. The broken and twisted rebar that probably used to form some kind of grate now more closely resembled a set of rusty teeth closing over the girls’ delicate forms. 

The other girl, a good deal larger, with pigtails and a bright pink raincoat, absentmindedly skipped a stone in Maddie’s direction. She watched the ripples from its point of impact lap up against the side of the worn suitcase. 

Not knowing what else to do, Maddie dialed 911 for the first time in her life and briefly explained the situation to the operator. They asked her for her location and she explained it as best she could, having only recently moved into the area with her partner Amber, so the latter could begin the prestigious engineering program she’d been accepted into. The operator informed her that an animal control officer would arrive shortly, so she waited right where she was, tugging at the leash of Hero, who was now in front of her, to keep him from investigating the curious package at the water's edge. 

Roughly thirty minutes of doing so later, Maddie caught a glimpse, out of the corner of her eye, of a figure perched on a ridge overlooking the ditch. It was a man, surveying the area with one hand over his brow like a 16th century trailblazer. She waved him over, careful to choke-up and keep a firm grip on Hero's leash. He didn’t particularly like new people. He didn’t particularly like anyone, save those he lived with.

A stocky, middle-aged man wearing a pair of ill-fitting khakis and a white uniform t-shirt with an upside-down nametag made his way down the slope and offered her his sweaty hand. He was middle-aged and balding, and one of those guys who somehow managed to rock a perpetual sunburn, even in the lightless days of bleak Midwinter.

“Matt”, he said, face beaming in a manner that was highly disproportional to the gruesome nature of the task he'd been assigned. 

“Maddie”, she replied, gingerly taking his hand in hers. “It's, um… it’s over there.” 

Matt nodded, still with a smile, and immediately went to work, eagerly snapping picture after flash picture of the scene and saving them to a numbered album on his phone. 

Maddie stood uncomfortably in the backdrop, wrestling absentmindedly with Hero's harness to keep him from lunging viciously at the man, who seemed completely oblivious to the dog's flurry of hateful snarls. 

“Sorry about him”, she said, more out a feeling of polite obligation than actual ownership of Hero’s behavior. 

Matt looked up, his face a mix of puzzlement and worry. “Heh?” He glanced over his shoulder to see Maddie repositioning her wrist so that the leash was wrapped twice around it, giving her slightly better control over the beast it was attached to. “Oh, you mean your guy. Yeah, don’t worry about it. I got a couple’a dobe’s at home myself.” He went back to taking pictures. “They’re all a buncha softies on the inside, so long as you treat ‘em right.” 

Maddie slipped and fell silently on her ass as he said this, deciding in a split second to take the fall if it meant keeping Hero, who had just risen up on his hind legs like a frightened horse, from pushing Matt forward and into the murky water with his severely untrimmed front paws. By the time she’d gotten back up and dusted herself off, Matt was turned around and scribbling furiously in his notepad. 

“Welp”, he started. “There really ain’t a whole lot we can do. I’ll report it to the Humane Society, but other’n that, we’re just gonna have to hope it was just some jackass not knowin’ how to properly dispose of their dead pooch.” 

He lifted his head, now bearing the look of shame and hope that’s flitted across the face of anyone who’s ever invited a friend over while they just so happen to have a couch that needs moving. “I don’t s’pose you know how to drive stick, do ya? I got my damn van stuck in the mud coming out here.”

Maddie shook her head no, gave him the rest of her personal information, and made her way back to the trail she’d taken to get there in the first place, pulling Hero along with her. Sure enough, just around the bend was a bulky white van, its rear wheels sunk nearly halfway into the muck. She knew perfectly well how to drive stick; Amber had made her pilot their rusty-old Saturn the entire twelve hours it took them to move out there while Hero barked incessantly from his kennel in the backseat. She hadn't wanted to drive very much at the time, but _had_ wanted to be closer in proximity to Amber and knew it was either that, or sitting in the back while Hero moved up front. Maddie had told herself it'd been fun. 

\---

Blair was sitting in a beat-up lawn chair from the 70’s, surrounded by shopping carts from the nearby supermarket, and mumbling incoherently into a flip-phone Maddie was convinced didn’t actually work, when she passed by the old woman’s camp on the trail that lead back to the apartment. It was the same thing Blair had been doing when they’d walked by some forty minutes earlier. 

She fascinated Maddie, although she was always far too wary to enter the camp whenever it was actually occupied. Maddie preferred to learn about others in a much more clandestine manner, observing their actions from a distance or seeing what kind of traces they left behind when they were no longer present. This didn’t _always_ mean digging through a stranger’s personal belongings, but in Blair’s case, it did. 

If Blair was her real name, it was nothing short of corybantic coincidence. Maddie had simply christened her that in an understandable response to all the Blair Witch Project-esque totems and talismans she had a tendency to decorate the trees surrounding her lean-to with. 

These included, but were not limited to, bundles of grass, leaves, sticks, and rocks, glass bottles with faded labels stuck onto the ends of tree branches, kitschy bird houses strung up by twine, and an astoundingly varied array of dolls, plushies, and action figures, each sporting their own unique body modifications or mismatched limbs. Maddie found it all to be an incredibly detailed dossier on the type of person who lived there (as well as a visually-pleasing homage to thrift store and overly-priced antique mall culture), which is what drew her to go snooping around last month, a few days after she’d first arrived in town, when the site had appeared to be empty. 

Fortunately, it had been, although she hadn’t had much luck sifting through the piles of tarps, blankets, and pillows Blair had (for whatever demented reason) left lying all over the path to her hideout. All Maddie had been able to find that allowed her a brief glimpse of the person behind the duct-taped poncho and multi-colored beanie she always wore was a crumpled, coffee-stained postcard, partially protruding from under the corner of a deflated air mattress. 

Lacking in context as it was, it could’ve been written by Blair’s father or boyfriend, but briefly alluded to her time working at a veterinary clinic. Maddie frowned upon reading this, glancing around at all the motheaten stuffed animals whose presence suddenly didn’t seem so out-of-place, and wondered what kind of mental health conditions, grossly-deteriorated relationships, or socio-economic insidiousness had led to Blair losing her footing so perfectly that she’d ended up where - and how - she was today.

Now Maddie watched her intently through the trees as she strolled by in tow of a squirrel-obsessed Hero, careful to avert her gaze the moment she realized Blair was looking into a cheap plastic hand mirror she’d been holding in her one free hand, and the two made eye contact for a single fleeting moment. Maddie quickened her pace to match that of Hero’s, and glanced down at her wristwatch. 6:11pm. She hastened further, now ahead of Hero and dragging him behind her.

\---

Maddie fumbled with the faded red carabiner she'd withdrawn from her pocket, searching desperately for the brass key she knew to be denoted by a cute, neon-green, house-shaped rubber sleeve covering its bow. Hero waited idly by her side, then bounded forward the instant she'd slipped the small piece of metal into the lock and begun to turn the handle, violently ripping the leash out of her hand with enough force to send her tumbling in suit through the now wide-open door. She grumbled on her hands and knees, about to make a series of instinctive, scathing remarks directed at the hound, before another voice made her think twice about doing so. 

"Where the Hell were you?"

Maddie looked up at the girl standing before her. She leered from the doorway of the apartment's one bedroom, arms crossed momentarily before Hero leapt into them, prying them open so he could be held like a child. Maddie tried scrambling to her feet, but was pushed back down by the stinging weight of the words coming out of her partner's mouth. 

I've been home for fifteen minutes. You didn't answer your phone. I thought you'd been kidnapped." She looked at Hero as she said that last bit. 

"Sorry", Maddie said, not really meaning it and reflecting it in her tone. "We were out walking, and - ". She stopped herself. 

Amber tensed her neck and subtly shook her head, giving a look of impatient expectation. "Aaaaand…. what?"

"And I… forgot what time it was,'' Maddie lied, deciding for the moment to keep her and heroes macabre discovery a secret for the time being. Amber didn't exactly have the strongest stomach for this (or any) type of thing. Beyond being generally squeamish, Amber had a deep respect for life that extended far beyond the typical plant-based diet and Greenpeace reblogging fare usually exhibited by other members of her ilk. 

Animal death of any kind (even if it was accidental or completely natural in both cause and circumstance) was something she objected to so vehemently that she'd once knocked a cup of vinegar and dish soap out of Maddie's hand while crying, because she hadn't wanted her to set a trap for the fruit flies that had been plaguing her grandmother's kitchen. 

In no creature, however, did this obnoxiously valiant defense of life manifest itself within her so concretely as it did with dogs. A childhood obsession with the animals had joined forces with the tragic passing of more than one family mutt (prior to the ownership of Hero) to foster an eternal love for the creatures that sometimes threatened to overtake what little personality she already had.

And so, it was with this in mind that Maddie decided that telling Amber about the incident (let alone that - because of her - Hero had been involved in or exposed to it in any way), would quite likely be a really, really dumb idea. 

"You've got a watch on, dummy", Amber said, and before Maddie could even develop a another sputtering excuse for what she failed to realize initially was nothing more than a gentle ribbing, let Hero out of her arms and reached out a hand to help Maddie up off the floor.

She pulled her up and into her torso, and the two embraced. Maddie stared blankly over Amber’s shoulder while the latter buried her face in the crook of Maddie’s neck, breathing in deeply as they rocked the weight of their bodies back and forth in place. They were almost exactly the same height, with Amber reaching just a centimeter or so above the few remaining hairs on the crown of Maddie’s recently-shaven head. 

Once, a friend of Maddie's had pointed out to her, rather bemusingly, that she was more or less dating a mirror. The friend had found funny. Maddie, on the other hand, had not. 

The friend hadn't remained a friend for much longer. Not many of them did. The move had made sure of that. It'd been worth it though, in Maddie's eyes, especially if it meant further enriching the one friendship of her's that mattered. 

They'd been right, though. Ever since hearing that comment, Maddie hadn't been able to unsee the similarities, and for whatever reason, it bugged her to the point where she started dressing as differently from her partner as possible whenever the two were to be seen with each other in public. Blue jeans were met with bright green shorts. Dusty tennis shoes contrasted with well-polished rain boots. A floral sundress clashed violently with stiff brown Carhartt's, and so on. It really gave Maddie a chance to exercise her discordant bisexual fashion sense. 

More often than not, though, she’d turn to her favorite, ratty, purple hoodie and faded red ball cap as a means of cementing a look she knew others would come to associate with her and her alone. 

She'd even begun cutting her hair shorter, and now sported a simple crew cut to oppose Amber's shoulder-length auburn curls (although she'd never gone quite so far as to dye it, and though Maddie would never dare say so, she’d recently become rather irked by Amber’s newly-developed tendency to wear her hair up in a bun that was tightly-pinned to her scalp). 

Maddie’s large, wire-rimmed glasses did a good job of setting the two apart as well, but at the end of the day, the resemblance between the girls remained uncanny. It might have been something in the way they carried themselves, opening doors and addressing people with that same sort of skittish determination, or perhaps it was more physical, having less to do with their individual mannerisms, and more to do with similarities in their facial features (some glaringly obvious, like their squashed button noses or calf-like eyes; others, more to do with character, and thus subtle enough as to be nearly imperceptible to the naked eye). 

But the real reason behind Maddie's constant desire to reinvent herself and cultivate such radical new looks wasn't something she was consciously aware of. She'd never do anything to distance herself from her partner. Not on purpose, anyway. 

Amber let go first, and did so abruptly, immediately shifting all of her attention to a whimpering Hero, where Maddie knew it would stay fixated for the remainder of the night. She grimaced, and without fully acknowledging it, felt the sudden urge to tell Amber about what she'd seen, using every lurid detail she could possibly conjure up to make her partner squirm with agitation and (potentially) indirectly behoove her to comfort a generally untraumatized Maddie. 

But another part of her knew all too well that sharing such information would likely result not in a manipulated Amber drifting once again into her partner's arms, but in Amber's sympathy being directed towards Hero, while her wrath was directed towards Maddie, merely for having exposed to the dog by to the scene by accident. 

In reality, Maddie hadn't actually considered this path, and yet it was as present in her mind as the autopiloting thoughts which wordlessly instructed her some thirty minutes later to once again don her favorite purple hoodie and begin walking out the door, keys in hand. 

“Where are you off to?” Amber asked from across the room, speaking for the first time in the last half-hour as she glanced briefly up from her phone. 

“Class”, Maddie said, unwilling to admit just yet how fed up she was with Amber’s refusal to learn her partner’s schedule, which had remained surprisingly consistent during the three or so months they'd been living together. 

“Okie-dokie!”, said Amber, sounding a little too enthused for Maddie's liking. She hopped up off the sofa she’d been sprawled across and made several robotics strides across the living room to where Maddie stood shivering in the half-open doorway, deftly kissing her goodbye. “Have fun! I’ll see you when you get back!” 

“I will. Bye”, Maddie cheerfully replied, trying her best as always to force positivity into her voice in a jovial attempt to counteract Amber's stiff, clockwork affection that Maddie often worried only appeared that way because she saw it as a reflection of her own. She stood outside the door for a moment, then began the walk to their car.

\---

The uneasiness she felt, the sour taste now lingering so blandly in her mouth… she knew it hadn't been from the dead dog. She'd been playing it over in her mind, but that was more out of curiosity than the inexplicable urge to prod at a fresh mental wound. Despite being aware of her inherit and uncanny ability to suppress obvious trauma, she knew this to be true. Having spent the majority of her life thus far under the aegis of a father who cared for more about hunting and fishing than he did sustaining an intimate relationship with any of his family or spouse had left her with a pretty big stomach for all things gore, animal death, and emotional unavailability. That's what she liked to think, anyway. Better to go through life assuming something good always came from your struggles. 

This left the only other thing of interest to have happened to her that day: the small window of time she'd spent with her girlfriend before professional obligations once again rendered them apart from one another. The idea of this upset her more than she ever would have been willing to admit (even to herself) as it carried with it the insinuation that simply being in Amber's presence wasn't enough to make either of them content; that some small element of their relationship remained unsatisfying to the point where it manifested within her in the form of these bouts of debilitating anxiety. 

As usual, Maddie began nursing a worry within this worry, that all of this was in fact rooted in her deep-seated fear that Amber felt dissatisfied with her. Somewhere along the line, she lost track of one of these thoughts, and there was no coming back from there. Not for her. Her head began to hurt. 

It ended up being irrelevant anyway, because as she completed her brisk ten-minute drive to the neighboring community college, she was forced (if a little relieved) to file these thoughts away under the label designated for those caused by anxiety itself. Nothing more than the idea of distress aching for a reason to exist. A probable enough explanation, and one that would have to do for now. She was running late, anyway. 

\---

Odd as it was for a poorly-ventilated room filled with paint fumes and chalkdust, the moment Maddie entered the hallowed halls of her equal parts cramped and sparsely-populated community arts class, she felt like she could finally breathe again. She smiled. Just like every time. 

Waiting for her at the front of the class was the tall, wooden stool she’d painted as part of her first project, turning the decrepit, unvarnished chair into a glowing tapestry of vines and bones, with brightly-colored wildflowers blossoming through empty eye sockets of grinning skulls, and thick green stems wrapping themselves around the lengths of several disembodied femurs. She'd been a little embarrassed, both by how much longer it took for her to complete the assignment than the rest of the class, as well as with how drastically the not-so-subtle morbidity of her piece contrasted with the peaceful, often abstract scenery everyone else seemed to have leaned into. She’d refused to apologize, though. She'd always had a penchant for the macabre.

No one seemed to mind, though, least of all their instructor, Joyce, who’d lauded Maddie’s work and had chosen to interpret its grim, yet Spring-y depiction as a celebration of new life, rather than death. Maddie had initially preferred not to look that far into it, but gradually grew to appreciate the explanation, even if it wasn't quite in-line with her original intention. She found that it helped bring some semblance of purpose to what had otherwise been totally chaotic, free-flowing expression. It even made her a bit proud of something that had turned out to be a bit blotchy in parts. It’d been hard enough to resist the praise of Joyce anyway. The fifty-year-old’s excitement often proved to be downright infectious. 

As Maddie went to seat herself, Joyce was drawing the blinds closed on the only window the room had. By this time of year, it was already almost pitch dark outside by 4 p.m., so the act of sealing off the only external source of light had an effect of making the room look even more sterile than it already did. There was a warmth to the room, though, which emanated not just from the active firing kiln shoved into the corner, but from the buzzing positivity of a dozen or so people who gathered together after days of waiting to build, craft, learn, and grow. 

Maddie set her supplies down at a table so tall she likely would’ve had to stand if it wasn't for the height of her stool. Just as Joyce finished fiddling with the blinds and began to make her way to the front of the class, a voice directly to Maddie's left said “Hey”, in an adequately hushed tone that tried to be in accordance with the soft murmurs of the quieting classroom, but that still nearly caused her to topple off her chair in fright. 

He'd never sat this close before. 

This was Eric. Nineteen? Twenty-two? Friend? Classmate? Acquaintance? In all honesty, Maddie knew little about this man with whom she shared equal amounts of tortillons and half-seconds of awkward eye contact over the course’s duration thus far. She didn't even know his last name. And yet, he was the only other person in class (save for the instructor) whose name she’d actually had bothered learning at all. 

Whether or not this meant anything in the slightest took backstage to the fact that Maddie attended these bi-weekly courses for the content of the classes, and the contents of the classes alone. She was barely employed as it was (working solely on commission, drawing and painting digitally for the occasional interested party online), and had decided long ago that if taking a community college art class that barely even related to her digital work was what it took to beef-up her résumé and prevent her from becoming a N.E.E.T., then so be it. 

She had to admit: he was cute, in a dorky sort of way, and his flocculant blonde hair flopped over the upper portion of his forehead in a way she probably would’ve swooned over, had she still been in high-school. 

“Hey!”she gleefully replied, sliding her supplies across the table in order to make room for his. He sat down on his own stool, which was the same shape and size, but where Maddie's was a maze of pale-green encroaching on patches of chalky white, Eric’s seethed with swirls of bright-orange flames licking at the edges of an electric-blue backdrop. In other words, it was easily noticeable. It had a way of standing out not so much in mind, but in memory, and while Joyce began to greet the class, Maddie couldn't help but recollect that it hadn't been positioned next to her’s when class had ended last week. 

If one were to adroitly place the edge of an old, rusty box-cutter to the skin of Maddie's throat and demand to know her deepest and most shameful secrets, what left her mouth after the fact would not have been a confession about the time she scraped someone's bumper in the parking lot after Christmas mass when she was sixteen, and kept quiet about it on her mother's orders. Strangely enough, it would have been that she was fond of Eric; not even in a romantic or sexual sense, but a general one. 

He seemed nice enough, and in the midst of a life that was just her, Amber, and Hero (beset with feelings of isolation and boredom as it so often tended to be), she occasionally found herself of yearning for the company of someone (or someones) to whom she wasn't constantly cabled by commitment (or, in Hero’s case, inherited responsibility). This wasn't to say Eric was the optimal candidate; more that he was the only one. 

Still, her unintentional fantasies of mild kinship hadn't occurred enough consecutive times to fully manifest into an all-out desire. And besides, within these unborn fantasies she felt the same damp fear trickling down the back of her neck that she felt when she interacted with just about anyone in a non-professional setting… one that warned of deceit and betrayal. 

The two of them sat beside each other for the first hour-and-a-half of class, which was devoted to lecture (specifically the Fauvist Movement, a unit they'd been on for several weeks now, and were surely nearing the end of). 

Even after that, however, when the last half of class designated to working on personal projects and assignments came about, they’d kept mostly to themselves, breaking the silence only for purposes of courtesy when passing supplies to one another. It was Eric who finally shattered that silence for good. 

“You all right?” he asked hesitantly. 

Maddie planned to pretend not to know what he was referring to, but choked at the last possible second and instead responded with a simple “Yeah, I'm fine.” Realizing almost immediately that her reply indicated the exact opposite, she backpedaled and said “I mean, kind of. I, uh... I _found_ something in the woods today, actually, while walking my dog.” 

Eric looked intrigued, but Maddie quickly became concerned that the gruesome subject matter of her topic of deflection might prove to be a rather inappropriate one. Sometimes it's not easy to tell if someone's a dog person without first seeing their incredibly obnoxious “who rescued who?” bumper sticker. Not usually. But sometimes. 

“It's, uh... It's kind of dark, actually,” she said, gingerly touching a few fingers to the back of her neck and weirdly failing to notice the paint from her hand staying behind. Fortunately, Eric didn't seem to notice either. Forty-three year old Gretchen Marovitch who was sitting behind them had noticed, but merely snorted and continued painting what she’d decided was going to be a gondola. 

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,'' he said sincerely, and for whatever reason, she believed him. Trusted him, even. 

“It’s fine, I don’t mind. I just wanna be sensitive, y’know? Content warnings and all. I know some people can be a little sensitive to this kinda stuff.”

He leaned back, considering. “Huh. I mean, I’ll probably be fine.” Suddenly, he leaned forward, as if remembering something important. “My uncle hit a cow with his SUV when I was fourteen, driving through Nevada. Open range. Blood _everywhere_. Uncle survived. Cow didn’t. Is it worse than that?” 

Upon finishing, he looked up at her for the first time since he’d begun to speak, and his face went white when seeing Maddie’s expression of surprised shock. 

“I-I’m so sorry, that was really inappropriate-”

Maddie cut him off by bursting into a fit of raucous giggles. After a moment, he followed suit. “No”, she said. “I don’t think it’s _quite_ that bad.” 

Once they’d settled down, she tried to look a bit more serious and told him what had happened. 

“Damn, that’s… that’s rough. A suitcase?”

She nodded. 

“Yeah, that dunn’t seem like an accident to me either. This animal control guy, you see his badge?” 

“What?”

“His badge. Or like a tag or somethin’. Or a number. Some kind of identification, y’know?”

Maddie shrugged. “He had a van? I think. I dunno, he seemed pretty official.” 

“Right! Yeah. I’m, uh… not really sure what I was getting at there.” He chuckled. It sounded fake. “Listen, uh, would you maybe want to… go bowling, or something? Sometime?`` he asked while scratching the back of his head contritely. 

Maddie winced. _Smooth transition_ , she thought. “Uuh,” was all she was able to get out before he began speaking again. 

“You could meet my girlfriend, maybe some of my other friends. Could be fun! No pressure or anything though. You seem like a pretty busy person.”

At this, Maddie lit up like a Christmas tree, and did her best to hide her ever-mounting anticipation as she accepted the offer casually. 

“Cool! That’s cool,” he said. “So… can I give you my number? We don’t have anything specific planned at the moment, but my schedule’s pretty lax, so just hit me up whenever. There’s a lot more to do around town than you’d think.”

“Yeah!”, Maddie said, pulling her phone out of her pocket. “Yeah, absolutely. Maybe you could meet my….” she trailed off, looking at her phone’s lock screen and the picture of her and Amber riding piggy-back at the beach last Summer. She remembered vividly how cold the water had been. How tightly Amber had gripped each of her legs, like nothing in the world could pry Maddie from her grip. 

“Um…”, Maddie stammered, then looked at the clock and realized class would be ending momentarily. Several other people had already gotten up to leave. “Maybe later, actually”, she finally squeaked out, already shovelling her things back into her bag and going to push her stool in. 

Eric didn’t say anything. Maddie couldn’t say for sure what his expression changed to, because she tried hard not to look directly at him as she left. 

\---

The second dog was harder to explain. This was particularly due to the fact that _this_ one (clearly an overweight bulldog) had been jammed crudely into what looked to be a large plastic fish bowl. Like Matt had said, one dog could be chalked-up to simple negligence. Two dogs was a different story, especially given the circumstances under which both had been found. Matt looked a little queasy this time as he reluctantly added the scene to what looked to be the same folder on his phone. Maddie stood awkwardly off to the side, fiddling with a loose blade of grass. 

“Y-you see this sort of thing often?” she asked timidly, wanting desperately to break the silence. He looked up from his phone and glared at her with a mix of suspicion and worried frustration. “No.”

The bulldog gazed lazily up at them, one eye peeled back and pressed up against the plastic by the rest of its body, twisted up inside the bowl in a spiral. Even from here, Maddie could make out a faded metal nametag in the shape of a cartoon bone that simply read “CHEF”. Hero growled lowly. 

\---

When the third and forth dogs (a beagle crammed messily into a birdcage, and a fully-grown newfoundland wrapped tightly in a + size sleeping bag, respectively) were called in, Matt arrived speaking into a pager. He looked many things: crusty, sleep-deprived, and sunburned as always, but ‘pleased to see his dear friend Maddie’ was not one of them. 

She tried to maintain a smile, or at least a stony disposition that might communicate a better handle on the situation as he strode towards her, clipboard in hand, but the expression he wore chiseled away at this brittle facade and quickly revealed the nervous little imp that cowered so weakly behind it. 

Here was a man who, despite all his aggressively non-threatening physical attributes (or perhaps because of them) managed to convey an air of absolute doom whenever he was truly upset about something, as rare of an occurrence as that was. It was something about the way his typically gentle demeanor contrasted so sharply with the dark emotion now seeping from his every pore. For many pot-bellied men such as himself, laden with carabiners and khaki cargo shorts as they so often tended to be, the very prospect of ever taking them seriously (let alone allowing them to come across as even remotely intimidating) would likely cause the most people to crack up with - and fall beneath - waves pretentious laughter. 

There was some half-buried aspect of Matt's behavior (likely aided by a career’s worth of bearing witness to all manner of animal-related violence and cruelty), however, that proved quite effective at hammering home for Maddie just how serious the situation she now found herself in was, and just how bad it looked for her now that she was in it. The only other thing she noticed beyond that was the simple fact that, aside from a cursory glance or two when he first clambered so awkwardly out of his still mudstained van, Matt appeared to take little to no notice of the bodies laying by the shore, and was instead focused on - and headed straight towards - her. 

Her confidence wavered more and more the closer he got, and by the time he had fully approached her, her confidence in the decision she made to contact him regarding what she'd found had petered out almost entirely, giving way to a tidal wave of doubt and fear. He reached her. They spoke. He called someone. They waited. She stayed. 

When the cop came, she complied without a fuss. The man assured her it wasn't an arrest, that they just wanted to ask her some simple questions. So she did as he asked, and although she was crying inside, she maintained her composure enough to complete the “interview”, as he kept calling it, without incident. 

She told him everything she could. Everything she knew. Everything she and Matt had experienced up to that point. Told them about how, after the first two times the morbidity of the situation really started sinking in. That it became significantly less fun to toy with the mystery surrounding the incidents, and that she'd done her best following the second occurrence to avoid that area entirely, but that she needed to walk her roommate's dog and, well, said dog happened to be quite a handful at times. 

Sometimes the dog would run off, she explained. He was simply too strong and impetuous for his (and especially her) own good, breaking his leash free of her grip and bolting off into the sunset, leaving her stranded in the woods and utterly mortified at the imagined response of her partner, should she return home without the dog in tail. She told them how she sprinted after him for what must have been at least a half-mile. 

She _didn't_ tell him that's she'd lost her favorite ball cap in the process, the wind sweeping it off her head and tossing it into a nearby creek, as this seemed too trivial a detail to bear mentioning. She told them how she'd finally caught up with Hero (who'd been momentarily distracted by a rabbit), right at the ridge of that terrible ditch. How she'd tried her hardest not to look, as much as she felt it pulling her gaze in its direction, and how it was instinct, not curiosity, that caused her to finally let her eyes rest upon its polluted, inky surface and trash-strewn shores bordering it when she'd heard a child's voice call out to her in a friendly manner. 

She explained how, upon further inspection, she determined this child to be the same that had been playing by the ditch the first time anything of any real significance had occurred there. Only this time, she and her friends weren't at the mouth of the pipe, but instead wading in the water on the adjacent shore, holding sticks and prodding at an oddly-shaped, lumpy bag and something shiny and plastic buried in the mud. Maddie had shooed them away, and they’d run off into the woods. 

Everything beyond that, the cops were already aware of. Matt had made sure of that, before leading a reluctant Hero into a kennel in the back of his van to keep him from bothering or lunging at the bored policeman after he'd arrived. 

The cop himself couldn't have looked more stereotypical, and considering the deeply rural, Midwestern sitting, Maddie couldn't exactly call herself surprised. He was bald and pale, with a thick mustache that looked like he'd picked it up from the side of the road, and wore a pair of dark aviators to protect from the harsh rays of the setting sun. He carried with him an aura of disinterest that caught Maddie off-guard every time it suddenly switched to one of concerned frustration, angrily grilling her about her involvement, why she'd been there, where she lived, who she'd seen, etc.; all questions she'd already provided the answers to. 

It was clear to her how suspicious the man found her involvement and presence there to be, and that he was trying his damnedest to convey it to her in the vain hope that doing so might shake some sort of Poe-ian confession from her lips (or at the very least rattle her a little bit while providing a boost to his own confidence and ego). 

He succeeded in accomplishing this second task, and while Maddy didn't show it, he certainly did. She kept a cool head though, snapping back at each of his chiding remarks with carefully (if hastily) curated remarks of her own that she prepared in her head in the moments of awkward silence spent standing beside Matt, waiting for the officer's arrival. 

She was acutely aware that the fairness of her skin was the only thing keeping her attitude from rapidly plunging her into a far graver scenario, and of how it afforded her the faux-confidence with which she delivered her words. She also knew, though, that despite this set of privileges, not having anything to hide didn't actually increase her chances of surviving the situation. Still, she could afford a little sass. She needed it, anyway, to help in covering up her own fear. 

Her name was Maddie Sinclair. She lived on 833 Griever Terrace. With her, uh, roommate. Her _friend_. It said all this on the ID she'd just given him. The girls? They'd run off once Maddie yelled at them, shooing them away from the corpses, which is when she called Matt, like she already said. Well she didn't really see what her 'work or education' had to do with - okay, fine. Yes, officer. She took an art class at Baker County Community College. She didn't currently work ( _like I’m gonna try to explain what I do to you)_ , but had recently applied for a cashier position at a local supermarket and was waiting to hear back. 

She thought she heard Matt scoff at this, and her heart and stomach hurt with this cruel reminder of how fragile a facade the polite courtesy of Midwestern manners sometimes had the potential to be. 

The cop didn't let it go easily. In a place like that, action like this is a squealing thing which begs the involvement of higher forces. It sits there, nestled in the mud, crying out for attention with a pungent odor and sloughing skin that only ripens with hurry of decay. Typically, those few beasts which respond to the call don't fall on their repast like wolves snapping at the bellies of still-kicking sheep, nor do they elect to toy with it, tossing it casually into the air as an overweight housecat would a fevered mouse. Alternatively, they choose to survey their prey from a safe-enough distance, circling lazily above it as they contemplate the act of diving. 

Sure, it's the most interesting thing to have happened in the barren wasteland in which they reside for quite some time, but still they question whether or not it's really worth the effort of descending. A meal may be guaranteed, but is it one they'll remember? Moreover, is it one they’ll be remembered for eating? 

Unlike the other creatures, these are thoughts they’ve time to ponder. After all, it's not like their prize is going anywhere. End is inevitable, anyway. There’ll always be more to come. 

_In_ the end, though, they didn't have anything inextricably linking Maddie to the scene of the crime, and were forced to let her go. The carrion sank into the loamy soil, its only captor being the rot which now so slowly recycled her bones. 

“I’m gonna need you to stay away from this area for the next few months while we get things cleaned up. You need to leave the scene and go home as soon as I do. I don't want to catch you skulking around here again, or I’ll arrest you for real. Got it?” 

His intonation made it clear to Maddie that the endgame here was to simply wait and see if anything else showed up. It wasn’t a situation he’d deemed at all worthy of his time or effort, but he’d logged Maddie’s ID and address, and would certainly be keeping a very close eye on her in the coming week indeed. 

She waited around for a minute after having been formally released, until the cop had left, feeling some strange sense of obligation not to distance herself from Matt until she’d done so in a manner she felt he would have considered polite. So they stood there together, each glaring at the squad car’s fading tail lights for completely different reasons, the emptiness of the soggy November air made obvious to them both, utterly void as it was of the earsplitting cicada drones they both knew would’ve filled the sky in the warm Summer months. 

Finally, Matt moved, breaking the silence of sound, but not of words, as he went to his van to retrieve Hero, the wet Earth squelching uncomfortably with each step he took. He seemed reluctant to hand over Hero’s leash. Maddie seemed reluctant to take it. 

“Thanks”, she mumbled when she eventually accepted the cord. Matt repaid her unconscious choice to be the first to speak by electing to be the second. 

“I don't want you coming around here anymore.” She nodded and turned to go, but stopped when he grabbed her by the shoulder. “Hey”, he said. “I mean it. I don't know what the Hell's going on here. Really, I don't. I mean, I thought you were being helpful at first, but now... Look, these things”, he gestured towards the misshapen black garbage bags leaning haphazardly against the hitch of his van, “they didn't start showing up until you did. And they _only_ show up when you do. I've been staying in this place out every night for four Goddamn weeks. That's how much I care about this job. And the only time anything besides a couple’a kids and some pissed-off geese show up is after I get a call from you. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

“Not really, no” said an incredulous Maddie, once again channeling the feelings of anxiety brought on by the event to ensure her voice quavered only slightly as she spoke. “You're not seriously implying I had anything to do with this?” 

Matt threw his hands up. “I dunno! I don't know. I don't know what I'm implying. I just…” He dragged his large hand across his face with exasperation, momentarily exposing the fleshy underside of his eyelids. “Look, you don't _seem_ like the kind of kid that would do something like this,'' he continued, glancing tentatively over at Hero, as if afraid the hound would fall on him for harassing his caretaker. “But it's really starting to look like you've got some hand in this, in some way or another. Maybe you know who's doing this and you're just not spilling.” 

He pressed on, despite Maddie's look of outrage. “I'm not saying you're behind this, right? But honestly, what would you think if you were in my position? You’re the only constant here.”

She didn't say anything. She couldn't think of anything to say. Hell, what _was_ there to say? A man she’d previously seen as the only possible means of explaining or ending any of this mess had just turned around and accused her of the very crime she’d spent the last few weeks unintentionally obsessing over. She desperately hoped he'd said what he did out of a primeval sensation of being cornered (similar to the one she’d been feeling), but she could already feel the doubt climbing steadily up the length of her esophagus, and begin to gently prod with a set of furry antenna at the base of the brain it would soon burrow into and start to call home. 

It hurt. Everything Matt had said. Everything he'd implied. Each word and lurid insinuation driven into her flesh and rooted there like some wicked, barbed nail that she tried her best to pull out but couldn’t. She considered herself to be a sensitive person on the best of days, carrying the slightest altercation around in the back of her head for weeks after the fact, mulling it over repeatedly and without rest. And although it was true that months of therapy had helped her recognize this pattern of negative thoughts, and had taught her that just being able to recognize said thoughts as being negative was a vital step in eradicating them entirely, it wasn’t something she’d ever felt the need or energy to finalize. 

And so, the stream of endless replays continued to flow while she walked home, piling onto one another like so many crystals in a snowbank of worry. 

She knew it wasn’t possible, what she was thinking. Not outside of _Fight Club_ , _Mr. Robot_ , or the mind of someone unhinged and impressionable who’d seen them one too many times. It couldn’t happen, _didn’t_ happen. Not like that. Her anxiety was being a bitch, but that’s all it was: anxiety. Obsessive-compulsive tendencies, maybe, but nothing that ever came close to what she (or any of her therapists, she was convinced) would call psychosis. And she knew she wasn’t a somnambulist, because if she was, Amber would’ve tossed her in the ditch ages ago. 

There it was again. Worming its way into every thought she had. She just wanted to get home. 

Her body jerked suddenly, and the line between her and Hero went taught. Instinctively, Maddie yanked on the leash hard, only feeling a pang of remorse when she heard him yelp. He’d stopped behind her and was growling at something just off the trail.

Maddie jumped as she looked up, seeing a face peering out at her from the thick brush behind the ridge overlooking the ditch. It wore a friendly smile, with wrinkles uncharacteristic of its young age. Unfortunately, recognizing the face as belonging to Blair didn't do much to assuage the uneasy fear Maddie felt at seeing her there, perched as she was in the foliage like some awful, overgrown scarecrow. 

They had met before, albeit curtly. Oddly enough, it had been outside the very same grocery store Maddie had applied to work at so much longer ago than she’d told the police officer just now. Even more odd was the fact that the chance encounter had taken place the exact same night she met with a heavily-disenchanted manager (whose hand-drawn name tag barely fit in the gigantic letters that spelled out “Mitch”) to conduct her interview at the undignified hour of 7:45 p.m. on a Tuesday. It had been… unceremonious, to say the least - a dog-and-pony show meant to convince superiors that new hires were at least being considered. 

Mitch clearly hadn’t been impressed with her résumé consisting solely of three Summers spent bussing tables in another state and spotty freelance work in a field he barely understood. He told her they'd be in touch. They both knew he'd been lying. 

It was as she was trotting through the smudged automatic doors on her way out (feeling somewhat dejected, mostly relieved, and mentally applauding herself for having successfully tackled this feat of mild responsibility) that she'd taking notice of Blair, huddled in a moth-eaten quilt on the sidewalk, calling out to patrons of the grocery store and asking for change. 

This was long after the first time Maddie had gone snooping around her camp in the woods, so the former recognized the ladder, but (presumably) not vice versa. Maddie had fumbled for a slightly-torn fiver from behind the zipper of her purple hoodie. Blair had thanked her and complemented Maddie’s hoodie... a lot, going so far as to shoot out a veiny hand and grip Maddie's forearm with a strength that surprised her, telling Maddie in no uncertain terms that if she ever got sick of the garment and wish to throw it away, Blair would be happy to take it off her hands. 

So technically, the two had met, however informally, and had certainly seen each other around every now and again. As to whether or not Blair in anyway remembered Maddie though was a matter up for serious debate. 

The leering face receded back into the shrubbery as an emotionally-drained Maddie lugged an unstimulated Hero behind her, doing her best to pretend not to have seen what she just saw. 

\---

The dream came again on Thursday night. Same as the others. She stood on an incline, her socks already damp from the dew that had soaked through her sneakers. An old wooden hammer hung loosely from the end of her right arm. It was small, but weighty, with a polished handle and a worn ball peen head. 

She could tell it was the same one from her art class, because even in the dark she somehow knew that the multicolored flecks of paint that peppered the handle were still there. It was a criminally underfunded program, and so this was the only hammer they had. 

Yet here she was, over seven miles from the repurposed bank where the class took place, gripping the item normally use for drawing still-lifes, swinging it above her head, and bringing it crashing down on the quivering nape of a basset hound's neck, causing the creature to crumple like a wet Dixie cup and dropping it to the ground instantaneously. 

All the damage was inside, so there wasn't any blood. No troublesome mess to clean up. Just a furry heap of twisted cartilage and broken bone that could easily be weighed down with some rocks or heaved into the nearest back-alley dumpster. Whichever it ended up being, she felt confident that the gentle twitching of the death throes would cease by the time the task was finally completed. 

She woke. Not with a start, but with a gradual sort of seeping into the material world made heavy by the still-forming knowledge that doing so would require her to confront the contents of the dream her subconscious was already trying so very hard to forget. But as she opened her eyes to be greeted by the taste of early morning decay emanating from between her own chapped lips, it was waiting for her with a set of miniature yellowed fang's, baring them at her from the foot of the bed. 

The sight of Hero laying there instantly brought her face-to-face with the actions and emotions of her dream-self, and immediately she felt like she was going to vomit. 

She knew her therapist would say that this was nothing more than a case of intrusive thoughts worming their way into her R.E.M. cycle the same way they would her waking mind. They were to be viewed as “nothing more than affirmations” of what she _wasn’t_ and what she was _afraid of being_ , not what she was, and much like a schoolyard bully, existed for the sole purpose of eliciting a negative response from her. 

Repeating all this to herself in the mirror didn’t have quite the effect of positive reinforcement she would’ve hoped for, especially because while doing so, she noticed with some dismay that a thin scrap of her treasured purple hoodie had been torn off at some point or another. Numerous loose strands hung from the fissure now, and she knew her fidgety anxiety wouldn’t be able to resist using them to make her unravel the entire garment. 

Although, looking back, she was unable to pinpoint the direct occurrence which marked the rather drastic worsening of matters, it soon became obvious that dead or injured dogs weren't something that were strictly consolidated to muddy man-made lakes in the woods. None of these instances bore quite the same attributes of the ones which seemed to have kick-started this whole thing, but all in all they proved close enough in nature for her mind to easily brand them as being connected. 

A missing dog poster outside the local supermarket. A clump of fur on the bottom of her shoe. And, of course, the coyote. 

That’s what she thought it had been, at least. It wasn’t easy to tell, not that she tried especially hard. All fur looked the same to her now. And that’s all it was. Fur. Fur and flies. Fur and flies and dark wet stains. It looked just like any other roadkill, but this roadkill stood out in that it became roadkill on the side of the same highway she took to get to class every Tuesday and Thursday of the week. 

This made it rather difficult to ignore. Impossible, in fact. She tried not to look at it, but it was always there in the corner of her eye, grinning at her with the broken smile of a brutally split ribcage. Always there to remind her of what she’d been trying so hard to avoid. 

It stayed there for days. Weeks. Months. Every day, no one came to clean it up. And every day, it got a little smaller, a little saggier, a little more eroded, slowly melting into the cracked asphalt like a child’s fallen ice cream cone, only over the course of thousands of hours. It was like watching a time-lapse video before it had been sped up.

And of course there was no other way to get to class but to take that road. And of course, of course, it couldn’t have been a deer, or a skunk, or a squirrel. Of course, of course, of course, it had to have been a coyote. A canine. A dog. 

By now, it had been months since she’d last visited the drainage ditch in the woods. But it didn’t seem to matter. To Maddie, it was almost as if visiting it even once had been enough to unleash a tidal wave of impurity onto her life, casting her into a brand-new ocean so deep and so wide and so dark that she couldn’t possibly know where the surface might lay. She felt numb. 

She knew, also, what her therapist back home would’ve said about all this: that it was just her brain trying to find patterns where none actually existed. Trying to find order in and make sense of the world around her as an indirect means of addressing a much deeper issue. “Apophenia”, she would’ve called it. “Dogs die all the time, Maddie”, she would’ve said. “Deep down you know none of this is related.”

Well, regardless of whether or not that was the case, Maddie didn’t seem able to exercise any level of control over the parts of her brain which sought these non-existent patterns out like flies to rot. Similarly, she couldn’t help tracing it all back to the first time she’d visited the ditch, and subsequently, what (or rather, _who_ )it was that had lead her there in the first place. 

Her heart said it was Amber. Her brain said it was Hero. Soon, her brain was saying her heart said Hero too. And so it did. All the animals in Maddie’s life seemed to be kicking the bucket in droves, and so naturally Hero would still be alive and kicking everything except buckets. And with him alive and kicking, Maddie too would have to remain alive and enslaved to his every waking whim. 

She thought back to when she’d first started walking him to begin with. It’d been because of the “fights”, for lack of a better word.

The first time it had happened, Amber had been alone with Hero. Maddie hadn't even been home at the time, but upon returning found Amber in tears, and was barely able to get her to explain through a series of choking sobs that Hero had experienced some kind of altercation with another dog at the park their complex featured; one that, according to Amber, started off as gentle playing, but quickly turned sour as the other dog "leapt on top of Hero" and began "mauling him". 

With one hand gently rubbing a still hysterical Amber's shoulder blades, Maddie looked sheepishly over at an unscathed and unfazed Hero gnawing on a hunk of rubber that'd probably cost a pretty penny at the pet store downtown. She thought exasperatedly about all the times the untrained mutt had pounced at passing strollers or filled the room with ear-splitting barks that bounced off the walls whenever Maddie had been too busy or tired to play, and reluctantly agreed to accompany Amber on their next trip to the park, promising to step in should things go wrong. She wanted very much for Amber and Hero to be able to visit the park regularly, if only to get them out of the house for a while (and have them be tuckered-out by the time they returned), but if Amber's hyper-sensitivity was threatening to jeopardize that, then Maddie would have to take it upon herself to intervene. 

It went just about as poorly as Maddie was afraid it would. It was admittedly a peaceful day at the park for the first few minutes, with only a few other owners even present. Then, Maddie made the mistake of turning her head for a fraction of a second, and by the time it swiveled back around, the serene atmosphere had been supplanted by a flurry of fur, paws, and high-pitched wails, some of which came from a (once-again) overwrought Amber. 

It wasn't easy for Maddie to tell what exactly had happened. Important details like ‘who attacked first’, or whether what had transpired should be considered playing or fighting were lost amongst the decries of Amber's overtly biased narrative and overly-protective nature. 

Regardless, it soon became obvious that frequent trips to the dog park were no longer an option, for the good of everyone. Maddie made a few phone calls and sent a few emails after that on Amber's behalf, complaining to the landlords in non-specific terms and asking that leash laws be enforced in the surrounding area. Their lack of a response only furthered Maddie's conviction that this just wasn't a battle worth fighting.

And so, this was how Maddie got stuck with the listless task of walking Hero several times a week. It wasn't something she particularly enjoyed doing, and it certainly wasn't how she wanted or expected the whole dog park fiasco to end, but she took comfort, however small, in the act of walking alone, even if she was being dragged around by a feral gremlin with attention issues the whole while. 

The last time she’d gone walking with him, they hadn’t been anywhere near the ditch, and yet had still run into the same girl who’d waved at Maddie the very first time they’d been to it. 

Well, nearly run into her, that was. Probably would’ve gotten a lot closer if Hero hadn’t barked so loudly at her, sending the girl scurrying in the other direction. She hadn’t been with her friend this time, and Maddie could’ve sworn the girl had been wearing the same red hat Maddie had lost just a few months prior. Because of Hero’s behavior, however, they hadn’t been able to get close enough for Maddie to confirm this for sure. 

After the girl was out of sight, Maddie kicked a rock in Hero’s general direction in frustration, narrowly missing his head in the process. Immediately aghast with herself for so many more reasons than normal, she’d begun to cry.

\---

“What’re you rummaging around for in there?”, Maddie tried to ask Amber. She couldn’t find the energy. Earlier that night, while at class, she’d made the mistake of making eye contact once again with Eric, who was now seated a few tables away from where Maddie sat with her new, blissfully silent partner, Gretchen. She then made the further mistake of smiling at him uncomfortably, an act which he not only returned, but apparently took as an invitation to walk over and try to make conversation with her once more. She’d used all the body language in her heavily-outfitted arsenal to communicate to him the foolhardy nature of attempting such a stunt, but before she knew it he’d been upon herher, a dark shape standing shiftily by her side. 

She’d stared ahead, focusing as hard as she could on the painting in front of her, but the shape in her peripheral vision remained. Finally, she’d given in and looked up, only to see that it was actually Joyce, regarding her with disdain. Amber simply smiled, too nervous to say anything or ask what the matter was. Joyce forced a smile, using only her mouth to do so, and walked away. 

When Maddie returned her gaze to the tapestry before her, it was all she could do not to shriek in terror. The Expressionist landscape she’d been diligently slaving away after for weeks on end now featured about a half-dozen or so clumps of tangled extremities crudely attached to the sunken faces of long-dead dogs, their eyes nothing but cartoony x’s meant to unambiguously relay their demise. 

She’d packed her things and left immediately. Joyce hadn’t bothered to stop her. 

\---

“My _hat_ , Madeline,'' she said angrily. “My hat has vanished off the face of the Earth, and I kinda want to know what you did with it.” 

That brought Maddie back to reality. Amber knew better than anyone how much Maddie hated being called by her full name. She leaned against the doorway with her shoulder and said “Oh, you mean _my_ hat? The one _my_ dad got me for _my_ birthday, six years ago?”

Amber, who was still on her knees at this point, lifted her head out from under their bed and forcefully threw a pair of socks on the floor. “Yes, if you’re gonna be pissy about it. _Your_ hat. The one _you_ never wear.” 

“What are you talking about? I wear it all the time.”

“Oh yeah? I haven’t seen you wear it in months. When’s the last time you wore it? Do you even remember?”

“Yes, it _was_ a few months ago, but that’s only because I lost it.”

“You _lost_ it?”, Amber asked, the outrage in her voice growing by the second and finding new confidence when Maddie visibly began to buckle beneath it. “When? How?”

Utterly terrified of accidentally admitting to her partner that she’d very nearly lost Hero all the way back in November, Maddie chose her next words carefully. “It blew off my head. Ages ago. Into the creek out back. B-but,” she stammered, looking for an out, “I saw it. The other day, I think I saw some kid wearing it in that same area. Maybe they found it and took it? I tried going up and asking them, but Hero-”

“Do _NOT_ make this about my dog.”

“I’m not, but he-”

“Seriously, Maddie. Stop. You’re full of it, alright? You’ve been acting... _so_ weird lately, and it’s getting me worried that you’ve stopped taking your meds again or something. You’re blaming the dog, you lost my hat, and you’ve been so cold I feel like I don’t even know you anymore. And besides, there’s no way some kid stole the thing. If you’re freaking out about it as much as you are right now, it honestly wouldn’t surprise me if you just saw what you wanted to see because you feel guilty for losing my stuff.” 

Maddie had already resumed crying by this point, She clutched her head with both hands, only wanting it all to stop. She had no idea if she was in the right or not anymore, and felt violently ill with the confusion that life had been thrusting upon her with such relentless gusto of late. 

Try as she might, years down the line, she consistently found herself unable to recall what exactly had happened after that, through all the tears and the yelling and the slamming of doors. All she knew from that point forward was that trust wasn't a luxury she could afford to have anymore. Not for her partner, and certainly not for herself. 

Somehow, she found herself in the woods outside their apartment. Whether she traveled here intentionally or by accident was something she remained convinced for the rest of her life she hadn't even been certain of in the moment. She may have been looking for the hat, and was intent on fishing it from the babbling brook it had blown into. After all, Amber was probably right; the chances that kid had made their way down the rocky embankment, waded into the water, and stolen the hat were pretty slim, even if she'd had help from her friend. 

Or, perhaps, there really _had_ been something in all those gnarled roots that called her forth to walk upon the evil soil from which they grew. Needless to say, she was in something of a daze when she wandered off the path and no longer knew where it was. 

Lacking the energy even for panic, she made up her mind to simply pick a direction and walk in it. Not two minutes later, and she was face down in the mud after having tripped over some unseen object by her feet. She felt a peculiar kind of fear well up in her throat as part of her brain went over the fact that whatever she just kicked had a certain amount of give to it, uncharacteristic of any kind of rock or root she’d clumsily stumbled over before. 

She got to her feet, and as if on que, the wind picked up, a lone cloud moved out of the way, and the surprisingly dazzling light of a quarter moon illuminated the grisly scene before her. 

Dogs. Seven or eight of them, strewn about the clearing. Some were unmarked. Others had visible craters where a blunt object had clearly been used to cave their skulls in. The level of decay in each of the specimens varied greatly from one to the next. Many of them were husks of their former design, and looked almost as if the flesh had evaporated from their bones, leaving only a thin layer of rumpled skin and fur to cover them. A few others (including the one Maddie had just walked right into) could have been as fresh as just a few days ago. 

The last thing she noticed was how curiously they were arranged, taking on a pattern that looked almost like a pair of concentric semicircles. The next and last thing she noticed before the voice from a few feet behind her caused her to spin around with her hands up was that she could hear the gurgling of water from somewhere nearby. 

“It’s you” was all the voice said. How it fit so much joy into just two small words was anyone's guess. Maddie didn’t recognize the voice’s owner immediately. The frame of the person it came from, however, was immediately familiar. 

Blair stood across from her, patchy rain poncho glistening in the moonlight. She held a grocery bag in one hand, and with the other she reached inside it and pulled out its contents to show Maddie. Maddie immediately turned away in repulsion and began taking several frantic steps away from the woman in front of her. 

Blair frowned. “Don't you like its casket?” 

“Get it away from me, please”, Maddie whimpered. 

Blair’s brow furrowed. “But it's ready for its voyage.” 

“Please,” said Maddie again. “I have no idea what you're talking about. I just need to know how to get back.” 

With one hand still grasping the contents of the bag, she gestured lazily behind her, where Maddie could almost make out the outline of a path. “You usually come from that way,'' said Blair, who now sounded more confused than Maddie did.

Maddie tried to move past her, but the woman sidestepped her, blocked the path once more. 

“It's ready for its voyage,'' she repeated. 

“ _Please_ ”, Maddie also repeated. “I don't understand,'' she said, as if saying it would make it true (her one great fear in that moment being that she _did_ understand). 

“You bring me the dead ones”, squawked Blair. “You bring me the dead ones and I send them upriver.” She jabbed a crooked finger directly at Maddie's torso whenever she said _you_ , and Maddie knew with a kind of terrible certainty that Blair was, in fact, specifically referring to _her_ as an individual. 

Still, part of her was hanging on to some tiny sliver of hope that perhaps this was all some big misunderstanding. 

”You bring them to me,'' she said once more, stepping closer to Maddie.”I package them. Send them away. Help them pass on.” She cocked her head. “You're missing your hat.”

“I'm sorry”, Blair continued, loosely gesturing at the bag. “It's all I could find on such short notice. I've used up all the shiniest containers I had on the first four. I'm looking for more. I hope that's okay.”

In another reality, where this surreal encounter hadn't been preceded by many weeks of correlating occurrences, Maddie would have just pushed past Blair, stumbled home in the dark, called the police, and been done with it, curiosity be damned. But as it was, her appetite for answers had gone teased and unsated for far too long, and now she needed information, regardless of what possessing it might mean for her in the long run. 

She took a deep breath. “Blair,” she started, momentarily forgetting that she'd no knowledge of the woman's actual name, (though Blair didn’t seem to mind). “Did you hurt these animals?”

As she asked this, Maddie kept her hands by her side (raised slightly, not so much that it would be perceived as a threat, but just high enough she hope she be able to land a solid blow or cover her face if she needed to), and tried to keep a distance of at least a few feet between her and the woman she kept having to remind herself was a potential adversary. 

Funnily enough, it was Blair now who stepped back upon hearing this, her face a nasty concoction of rage and disgust. “ _No!_ I would _never!_ ” 

Maddie's face, now looking more confused than ever, pleaded with Blair as her voice began to do the same. “Did... Did _I_ hurt them?” 

There was a moment of silence between the two. “Doctor”, Blair said calmly, as if explaining to an angry child the ice cream parlor that was closed that day. “Each of these creatures died of natural causes.” 

Maddie glanced at the specimen resting by her foot that appeared to be missing an ear, and regarded her with doubt. It was early March, but even now the first stalks of ivy were beginning to emerge from the frosted soil beneath it and slowly starting to wrap themselves around the bones, looking for all the world like the cloying tentacles of a partially-submerged sea beast reaching up from the Arctic waters to claim yet another skeletal vessel. 

“You of all people ought to know that,” Blair went on. “You're the one who brings them to me.” 

Maddie winced, but continued breathing deeply and steadily, forcing herself to believe that there existed a rational explanation for all of this that didn't end with her being implicated. “I… I think you have me confused with someone else.” 

“Don't be absurd,'' said Blair. “Here, I'll show you.” And with that, she turned around, hand still clasping at the withered handles of the fetid grocery bag, and set foot on the path she’d (presumably) snuck up from. Maddie followed behind at a distance, if only so she’d have a better idea of how she might find her way back to civilization. 

It didn't take long. A couple minutes of wading through dry twigs and soggy, dead leaves and they were back on what Maddie recognized (via the dull industrial orange of a nearby street lamp shining through the trees) as the heavily-tagged concrete walking trail that snaked for a few miles through the woods behind her apartment complex. It was the same one she and Hero used to walk on before life had become so hostile and malevolent, and they’d had to start walking on a branching path that bordered a busy freeway (which, of course, boasted a remarkably diverse assortment of brutally-slaughtered roadside fauna). 

Maddie knew the way home from there, and understood that she must have wandered off the main trail some twenty minutes ago and wound up in the section of the park Blair was known to inhabit, as the spoor they’d just emerged from looked to be the same one the Maddie had tread upon when exploring Blair's encampment for the very first time all the way back in September. 

Maddie could’ve split at any point she had the desire to, and probably would have been able to outrun the frail woman she found herself with, if it came to that. Instead, she found herself rooted to the spot, drawn to the ledge Blair now sat perched over like a vulture, even as a crude explanation as to what purpose it served in this particular context began to find purchase in her mind. 

“What is this?”, Maddie asked in a dreamy voice from behind the crouched figure. 

“I'll show you, Blair said, beckoning Maddie with her hand without turning around. Maddie took a few steps closer, but didn't stoop down to Blair's level. 

“This is where I take them after you put them to sleep. They're God's creatures, after all. They deserve a proper burial, like anyone else.” And with this, she brought the arm that was holding the bag back, and as if she was bowling, ever so gently swung it back again to let it go at just the right moment, carelessly sending the bag and its contents sailing through the chill night air. It rose in a swift and silent arc before its trajectory crescendoed, and it hit the water below the sickening thud, not dissimilar to that of a handful of wet hamburger meat making forceful contact with an old brick wall. 

The water was shallow and partially frozen, causing the bag to strike the rocks below and split, spilling its contents into the inky miasma before sloughing off onto a sheet of ice, which broke as easily as sugar glass. The pieces (some inside the bag, some now out of it), bumped into a few more rocks and clumps of ice before reluctantly allowing the stygian current to finally carry it out of sight. 

Neither of them said anything as it did, but Maddie watched out of the corner of her eye as Blair gave a faint little wave to the disappearing package. 

Maddie was, understandably, experiencing a great deal of trouble processing any of this, and as such was only able to remain calm through that numbing feeling one gets when dissociating, that causes emotions to cough and sputter like a failing engine; toying with the idea of coming to life, but never quite getting there in the end.

“This doesn't make any sense,” she continued, growing increasingly agitated, the engine threatening to flood itself with a deluge of barely-suppressed fervor. “If you're the one tossing them in there, how are they ending up in that ditch? Where do they go?” 

Blair reached up, gently placing a hand on Maddie's wrist. “No one knows for sure, sweetie.” 

Maddie slapped the hand away angrily. “That's not what I meant.” 

Then, for one reason or another, the penny dropped. 

Maddie's hat blowing into the river. The same river in which Blair had been disposing of the dogs. 

The dogs which seemed to drift away with the stream and wind up at the same bank of the man-made pond. 

The bank which stood adjacent to the ominous slate pipe that the girl who'd somehow gotten her hands on Maddie's hat loved to play in. 

“Why…”, was all Maddie was able to muster at first. “Why do they only show up when _I_ do?” She turned to Blair and realized she had no idea what Maddie was referring to. “The dogs”, she said. “Why do you only ever... ‘send’ them when I'm out here in the woods with you? How do you even know when I'm out here?” 

Blair gave a faint half-smile, placed her palms on her knees and rose to her feet. Maddie stumbled backwards as the woman reached out a hand to place on her shoulder, stopping just short of tumbling off the ledge in the process. If Blair noticed, cared about, or in any we registered this, she certainly didn't show it. The look on her face didn't once change. 

“You've done the good deed of bringing these lost souls to me. The least I can do is help involve you in the process of their final departure.” 

“But why? What have I got to do with any of this? Tons of people come through here, why the Hell aren’t you bothering _them_?

“Not _you_ , silly. Your _dog_! The big Doberman! You're the one that brings me the departed, sure, but he... _Oh_ , Maddie, _he's_ the one who guides them, away from this life, to where they can rest! And I know this because he walks with _you_! You, the coroner, he, the shepherd, and me, the mortician! Together, all of us, a trio of saints and undertakers. Look!” she said, pulling at the hem of Maddie’s shirt while pointing downstream, which now began to froth slightly with the added current given to it by the newly-broken ice, apparently unencumbered by the numerous wads of wet hair attempting to account for its absence. “The water!” She turned again to point at the path it ran alongside. “It flows in the same direction as the road he travels. And as he travels tonight, he'll travel alongside the one we've just sent off.”

She continued. “I see you, you know. Every time he passed through this way. I see everything in these woods.” 

Maddie shuddered, despite herself, at the hideous prospect of having been watched for months on end, and of having walked in tandem with each of the corpses that had caused her such torment each time she did so, always just a few feet away. 

Somehow, she was able to compose herself once more, enough to look Blair in the eye. “You keep saying _I’ve_ been doing this. That _I’ve_ been coming here, that _I’ve_ been bringing you these… these _packages_.” 

“Yes”, said Blair. 

“Well... that isn’t true. I haven’t even been here in mo - I haven’t been here. I don’t know who you’ve been seeing, but it isn’t me.” She paused, doubt still cloying at her like cold crab claws. “What… what did they look like?” 

Blair gave a smile that communicated nothing but pity. “Darling, they looked like _you_. Purple sweater, mousey features, bright red hat. And you come with the dog every time. One in your hand, and one on a leash. You place them beneath some twigs, and leave. But you never walk down the trail the same day.”

“It’s okay,'' she said to Maddie, pulling her into a hug. “You’ve been doing good things.”

Maddie wanted to scream; not out of repulsion, but of fear. Of refusal to accept anything she was being told. She pulled herself out of Blair’s embrace, reeking of citronella. 

“I've been aching to show this to you for ages,” Blair went on, seemingly oblivious to Maddie’s state of distress. “I'm sorry to have kept it hidden from you for so long, but you and your dog haven't come by together in such a long while. And now that you’re back, I finally have the courage to show you. To send one out while you’re here with me.” She sighed and turned to face Maddie yet again. “It’s time for you to go now. Follow the path like you usually do. Catch up with your dog. We very much need you two together in order for the little one’s soul to finish passing on.”

“He’s not my dog. And I didn’t bring him with me”, Maddie said offhandedly, ignoring all the other bizarre statements Blair had managed to pack into everything she’d just said. “Are you sure they looked like me? How tall were they? How did they act? Did you talk to them?”

For once, Blair didn’t answer. Her face had gone white. “He’s… he’s not... _with_ you?”

“...No?” Maddie said, unsure of what exactly was unfolding. 

“But he’s on the trail then, yes?” 

“Why would you assume he’s with me? 

“I said no. I didn’t come with him tonight. He’s back at… he’s not here. What does it matter?”

Blair’s previously hunky-dory disposition suddenly erupted, instantaneously morphing into one of utmost alarm. _“HE’S GONE?! NOT HERE?! WHY DIDN’T YOU **SAY** ANYTHING?! WHY DIDN’T YOU **STOP** ME?!” _

She gesticulated wildly in Maddie’s direction, but Maddie was wholly unaware of what was happening or what she was meant to do about it. Blair looked frantically back and forth between Maddie and the stream beside them, then, without warning, lept off the ledge, crashing down into the icy water and landing painfully on all fours. 

Maddie clasped both hands to her mouth, purely as a reflex, thinking the woman had just tried to kill herself. Blair scrambled to her feet however, and without casting a single backwards glance at the girl she seemed to have previously regarded as something of a close friend (or at least some kind of colleague) began splashing through the slush ahead of her, screaming about how she’d “damned the dog’s soul”, that he’d “get lost without his shephard”, and that she needed to “get him back”. 

Maddie stood there for a full two minutes after the fact, not knowing what to do and unable to act. After another minute of uninterrupted inaction, Maddie made up her mind to call the police, as she’d become convinced Blair would die of hypothermia or something similar, and began walking briskly in the opposite direction. She took her phone out of her pocket, ready to dial 911 the moment she made it out of the woods and could remember what the name of the street closest to her current position was.

She hadn’t gotten further than fifteen feet away from where Blair had jumped when something caught her eye that made her drop her phone entirely. It took her several minutes to pick it back up. The interim was spent staring in horror and disbelief at the strand of purple fabric hanging from the edge of some brambles. It hung there, shivering gently in the breeze. 

Behind it, Maddie could see a set of footprints in the thin layer of snow from where she and Blair had just arrived. As much as she tried forcing herself to remember, there was no hope for her to do so. She simply hadn’t brushed up against a single object on her way out of that awful, cursed clearing. She knew, then and there, that Blair, likely frozen to death by now, had been telling the truth. 

\---

Maddie didn't walk home, so much as she floated there. It was eerily similar to the manner in which she arrived in that cluster of dead trees they insisted on calling a park in the first place, although instead of being clouded by a maelstrom of unbridled negative sensations, the current sort of pseudo-fugue state she now found herself in was characterized far more prominently by a rather severe lack of them. 

Her mind in that moment was a machine of many gears, cogs, and greebles, all of it clogged up with the thick gunk of so much unchanged oil and lubricant; each of the dozens and dozens of delicate pieces gently trembling with all that potential energy, weighed down by an insurmountable muck. Her body, on the other hand (and as it had done before), did a remarkable job of ferrying itself in the general direction of home in spite of the myriad of internal problems it found itself dealing with. 

It may have taken her through a litany of front lawns and ravines, showing no regard whatsoever for all the borders and lines a society uses to illustrate where feet may tread, but the fact that it was able to bring her to her own front door in spite of all the horrors that undoubtedly lay within, and without receiving a single real command to do so was something Maddie might’ve marveled at, had she not been so busy being entrammeled by so many insidious complots of shock. 

She knew, as her hand graced the front door knob, that within seconds, she’d be forced to confront not just the entirety of the night’s events, but all those of the past six months as well. There would be no more running from the certitudes of an unfathomably-broken mind (one which, it was beginning to seem, forced her hand ad nauseum and had somehow hidden the details from itself with unparalleled conviction. 

All of it, presumably, stemming from a deep-seated resentment of Hero and, by proxy, Amber. All of it a heavily-repressed means of exercising some kind of short-lived control over a life and environment infinitely famished of any form of intimacy or real human connection. All of it now bearing its repercussions down upon her with all the crushing weight of a thousand wet sandbags. All of it. All of it. 

She stepped inside. The door swung shut behind her. It was meant to alert Amber of Maddie’s presence without requiring the unbearable strength it would’ve taken her to verbally do so. She was the only life preserver a violently thrashing Maddie could see in the choppy waters surrounding her. 

It would be okay. She would understand. She’d understand that it wasn’t Maddie’s fault. She’d comfort and console Maddie. Stroke her head and hold her for hours and hours as Maddie wept openly into her partner’s lap. They’d stay there like that, inseparably fused for eternity like an excavated couple at Pompeii, letting the exhaustion of grief and total personal upheaval drag them by their feet into sleep. 

Then, in the morning, they’d leave. They’d leave and go far, far away. Maddie didn’t know where, but Amber certainly would. She’d get Maddie help. Get her checked in somewhere, medicated, monitored, cared for and looked after. They’d be happy together yet again. It would be okay. They’d been together three years. It would _have_ to be okay. 

But no. No, no, _no_ , that was ri _dic_ ulous! She’d never understand. She barely cared about Maddie as it was, and the moment she discovered what Maddie had done, what she’d _been_ doing, there would be no returning. The police would be called. She’d be charged. They’d send her away somewhere, that much was certain. If she was lucky, to be treated and studied and counseled and contained. And if she was unlucky... 

But that would be it for her. This life, however empty, was one she knew she would yearn daily to return to once the familiar (if aggravating) faces of Amber, Hero, Eric, and Joyce were replaced indefinitely with the emotionless mugs of unbothered security nurses. No. There would be only one way out of this. One way to simultaneously stop, punish, and rid herself permanently from and of this Hitchcockian nightmare. 

She steadied herself by the sink, paused for a moment, then threw up into it, the muddy beige of her watery sick which splashed up the sides of the stained metal tank indicative of a diet halted by stress. Once again, her thoughts had hit a penny on the tracks and fully derailed, refusing to accept the fate she’d already considered so many times before. 

Her phone buzzed. It was a text from Amber. Whether or not she’d heard the sounds of poorly-restrained retching emanating from the kitchen over the sound of whatever garbage reality program flickered through the space beneath their bedroom door was unclear. “I forgive you”, it said. “Come watch T.V.”

Maddie creaked the door open, shuffling inside in a manner reminiscent of either a child coming to tell their parent they wet the bed, or of the Golden State Killer, depending on who you were asking. Amber turned over in bed and smiled without opening her mouth, paying no heed to the shell-shocked look on Maddie’s face or the little pockets of bile gathered at the corner of her lips, but quickly going to comfort a disgruntled Hero who’d been disturbed by her sudden movement. 

Not saying a word, Maddie lay down next to her partner, her eyes facing the mottled yellow ceiling. Amber swung an arm over Maddie’s chest, and drew herself in closer so that she could nestle the bridge of her nose against Maddie’s arm. She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes, unable to see the droplets starting to form in and around Maddie’s. 

They lay there together for a long time, letting themselves be comforted by television’s hypnotic glow and the warmth of the creature by their feet. Maddie began making the effort to speak about fifteen minutes before the words actually left her mouth. 

“Amber?” she asked in a voice so meek it was nothing short of a miracle that the person it was intended for actually registered it as an attempt at communication. 

Amber opened her eyes and shifted her weight to get a better look at Maddie’s face. There was a crinkle. 

Maddie turned, an instinctual curiosity momentarily overcoming the weight of her more “pressing” concerns.

She only saw it for a fraction of a second. But that was enough. 

A grainy, black-and-white ear, bent over at the top, and protruding slightly from beneath Amber’s pillow. The letters “ING” in large, bold, black text. The last few digits of a phone number. 

Maddie’s heart caught in her throat as she thought of all the altercations Hero had been having with the neighboring dogs since they’d moved in, and all she could think after the two-and-a-half-second window it took her to put the rest of the pieces together was why she never once questioned why Amber had been looking so desperately for a hat that wasn’t hers. But she knew the answer to that already.

Her hand drifted slowly to the phone in her pocket, while her mind went over the pitifully-short list of people she could call. People she could tell. Someone. Anyone. She’d fling off the covers. Run. Lock herself in the bathroom. Dial a number. She could already hear Matt’s vitriolic voice speaking directly into her ear. _“Maddie, I swear to God…”_

Or Eric, she could call Eric. Eric, a friend, Eric, her only friend. Except she’d never gotten his number, had she? Never made that connection that would’ve helped root her in reality. And she’d made that inadvertent decision not to...out of fear. 

“Yeah?”, said Amber, sleepily. Maddie looked dead into the eyes of someone she didn’t know, and now doubted she ever had. But as she looked into those pools of Earth with no small amount of crust having gathered at the edges, she saw herself in their reflection, and she felt herself relax for the first time. They knew each other. They knew each other all too well. 

“I… I love you”, Maddie said, for the first time. 

Amber paused, then beamed. “I love you too.”

Their lips met. Then they met again, and again. They placed their hands on one another and merged themselves into one. 

From the foot of the bed, Hero half-opened an eye and once again growled lowly. 

End


End file.
